Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
I have read the quote before but never seen it attributed. Always sort of assumed it might be Yogi Berra.
It is a clever bon mot but it does make me wonder whether it is unintentionally true?
There is the nostalgia for when we were young. Oh to be fifteen again. That sort of thing. When the world was fresh and unknown and new and exciting.
And then there are the people we and things we interacted with back then, how we experienced the world as it was. That fades away. "The old has passed away; behold, the new has come." People move away or die. Buildings are torn down and new ones constructed. The world as we know it evolves.
But with Moore's Law and the speed of technological change, I wonder if indeed, nostalgia isn't what it used to be. It gets increasingly hard to remember what the world was like because it was so different than anything now.
Long conversations with people face-to-face.Lazy Sunday mornings with pounds and pounds of newspapers, including the comics.The enforced periods of reflection such as driving a car with no radio.Making sure you had enough cash from the bank for the week.
On and on. It's not that young people today can't understand what it was to be a fifteen year old fifty years ago. It's that it becomes increasingly hard for those who were there at fifteen, those many years ago, to reconstruct what it was like. We can remember if we set our minds to it but it is a chore because our new modern reality is so different.
I wonder if nostalgia isn't what it used to be is increasingly true because the relatively recent past no longer maps well to the present.
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